by Robert C Ray
With her right hand, she grasped the top of the tube, and planted both feet firmly on the glass for leverage. This was the position that she needed to be in, and now all she had to do was to wait.
Slowly she closed her eyes, knowing that her other senses would be far more important, and would be enhanced by doing so.
Her hearing was attuned to the sounds of every electronic device around her, and that included the things that were at the furthest reaches of the facility. Each had a frequency that was slightly different from all others, and she could hear them all. Now she only needed to await their silence.
It felt like forever as Viper sat there waiting, though finally what Charlie had promised her occurred.
It took only milliseconds before she flinched into action at the sound of the power going out, and instantly she launched herself from the glass prison that they had been torturing her in.
In one quick motion, she ripped off the remaining wires, and turned off the machine that they were connected to, which happened before her wet feet ever touched the floor.
Her damp feet however, were also a part of her calculation, and they slid directly over to the lab table where Charlie had left his lab coat, and she quickly grabbed it by its collar, and swung it onto herself.
Her foot pressed firmly against the table exactly as she knew it would, and she then pushed off of it in the opposite direction. This action landed her in the chair in front of the computer, completely covered, and for a moment, she smiled.
"Three seconds was more than enough time, my prince," she thought to herself as she waited for the generators to kick in.
* * *
"Then I did what I needed to do," Viper told him as she still stood shivering outside his doorway. "Will you please help me?"
Charlie stared at her for a moment, with his jaw dropped, before he found the courage to ask the obvious question.
"Did you kill anyone?"
"No!" she said in almost a shout, before turning slightly to leave as though offended by his statement, but she turned back, knowing that she needed him.
"They don't even know that I'm gone yet," she told him as tears began to gather within her pale, green eyes. "I made sure of that."
Dropping his gaze, he began to think of what the next logical step might be, though her action disrupted his thinking process.
"Why did they do this to me?" she screamed in just more than a whisper as she threw her arms around him, and began to cry on his shoulder.
"Why did they torture me?" she sobbed.
He could not help but to embrace her. Hours ago, she was trapped within their terrible maze, and now she had been prematurely thrown into the world. It was a world that would terrify anyone, considering her circumstances.
"I'll help you, Viper," Charlie said as he ran his hand down the back of her long, blonde hair, but as she quickly looked up at him, his tongue became numb.
"They gave me that name," she said in a scolding fashion. "Please don't call me that."
Gazing down into her eyes, she quickly glanced away at the floor, and gently he led her inside, and shut the door behind them.
"What should I call you then?" he said with a smile, trying to comfort her in any way that he could, but her sense of meekness comforted him more than he could have anticipated, as her eyes met his own once more.
"You pick a name," she said with a genuine smile.
He thought about it for a short moment, and though many ideas passed through his mind, one seemed to stick out more than the rest.
"Ok, Kitten," he called her as he smiled down upon her, and then removed himself from her embrace. "Welcome to my humble abode."
Glancing around as though cautious, and afraid of everything, she moved inside, trembling with every step as though to fear everything around her. It was her first day of true life, and Charlie understood this.
"Nothing is going to hurt you here" he assured her as he led her to the sofa, but even as she sat down upon it, she frantically glanced around as though something might jump out at her.
Sitting beside of her, she firmly grasped his leg with both of her hands, and stared wide-eyed into his own brown eyes.
"Why did they do this to me?" she implored, yet hardly could he find an appropriate answer.
"Because they really don't know what they’re doing," he finally answered as he recalled the debacle that was known as Mirage, "and they are slow to learn."
Charlie could not tell if she fully understood his answer as she continued to look around aimlessly, though finally she stared back up at him.
"I need things," she began to explain, "or they can kill me just as soon as they know that I am gone."
Before he could ask what she needed, or even why, she began to explain it to him.
"They have implanted a device in my lower back," she said as a tear ran down her soft cheek, and her expression was no less than terrified. "If I do not remove it before they are aware, they can simply push a button, and I will die."
At first he stuttered, but then cleared his throat.
"What do you need?"
"I need a very sharp blade, some peroxide, butterfly stitches, and some bandages," she said in a whisper as though afraid of what needed to be done, "and I will need your help."
His jaw dropped for a moment, for though they called him doc, hardly was it about the field of medicine. It would seem that she was asking him to perform surgery, and he was nowhere ready to do so.
"Can you do CPR?" Viper then asked, and he was glad to hear such a question. Although he had never been certified, it was something that he had learned as a child while in the Boy Scouts.
"Is that all that I'll have to do?" he asked with a feeling of relief, before realizing that she was telling him that she could be dying in front of his eyes.
"When I remove the device," she explained with a somber expression, "it will initiate a command that is built into my brain, and my heart will stop."
He did not like this idea one bit. Sure, he had learned CPR, though it seemed like ages ago, and he never had to actually use it. The idea of watching her die, and having her rely on such distant knowledge to bring her back, brought great fear to his heart.
"What if I fail?" he asked, yet the answer seemed rather obvious to her.
"If you fail," she replied with a comforting tone, "then I will still be better off than if you were not to try at all."
This did not make any sense to him at all. Either way, she would be dead, but she quickly found the words to help him understand.
"If you try and fail," she told him as she placed her soft hand upon his cheek, and caressed it gently with her thumb, "then I will go with at least the knowledge that you cared."
This made some sort of sense, but he still felt like death would suck for her, no matter how it came about.
"First we need to get you into a hotel room," he told her as he grabbed her up, and began to lead her back to the garage. "My home isn’t exactly the safest place for you to be."
The ride to the room was a quiet one, as they were both consumed by their own thoughts, though on occasion, he would glance over at her, and admire how beautiful she was. The fact that she was designed that way did not matter at all, because every beautiful woman has the unfair advantage of simply having the right genes brought together.
The fact that they would try to create the perfect assassin, while making her that desirable, however, he considered to be a very cruel joke to the entire male gender, but she was not at all like what he thought she would be like. Awakening early was obviously something they had not counted on, and the pain that he could see she felt was clearly a factor in how she now acted.
From time to time when he would glance over at her, she would look back at him, and although she would always smile, Charlie could see that it was feigned. She was trying to hide her confusion and fear, and it ripped at his very soul. He wondered how they could have done such a thing to her, despite the fact that he did not know the ex
tent of it. Being the ones that created her did not make it right in any way.
Pulling into the lot of the cheap motel, he found a spot in front of the office, and put the car in park. He felt she deserved a nice hotel room after all that she had gone through, but he could not deny the logic of her decision to come here. It was very low visibility, without any cameras, or even the need to provide a valid driver's license. It was simply cash, and no questions.
"I'll only be a second," he politely told her before stepping from the car to secure a room. "Everything will be ok," he assured.
While he was away however, it was only the haunting of her tormented past that taunted her mind. Sure, it was a fictitious past, yet it felt as real as they come, and she would forever have to remember it.
She remembered the man that had raised her, and though she could never see his face, his eyes still ripped at every muscle that continued her beating heart. They were cold, calloused eyes, with never an emotion of kindness within them, and though she had often imagined her mother's and father's eyes staring lovingly back at her, his, behind his mask, where all she truly knew.
Now, even her hopes and dreams were shattered, as she came to terms with the fact that she never even had a mother or father who would have actually loved her. Now she had to come to terms with what she actually was, and at the core of it was not a freak of nature, but rather a freak of science and madmen.
She remembered how he had put her on the rack as a young child, and as she screamed out in agonizing pain, he would yell at her to deal with it. The world was pain, he would tell her, and she had either to put up with it, or attempt in vane to destroy the world.
In time she learned to ignore the pain, and not because he wanted her to, but rather because she had to, and she could also see that he enjoyed her tears. Pleasing him was never her desire, but often it had been the means to her own survival.
"They gave you room thirteen," he said with a grin as he climbed back into the car, revealing that he believed in such a thing as an unlucky number with his tone, "but he said that it was the best room that they had."
"It has a Jacuzzi," he added as he leaned over his right shoulder to back out. "Do you know what that is?"
This was the first time that he felt belittled by her, as her glare made him feel small enough to fit beneath the pedal that his foot now pressed against.
"I'm not stupid," she scolded loudly, with fervent eyes, but before he could stutter out an apology, she made him feel much better... in a way.
"I'm sorry, Charlie," she said as she turned her head to look out the window, and postured herself in a way that would more resemble a shattered child, than it would a grown woman. "It was wrong of me to yell."
He opened his mouth, yet nothing came out. He reached over to her as she gazed out the window, but it was like touching a manikin, for she moved not even with the slightest flinch.
"You are beautiful to me," he attempted to console, and his actions seemed to make a difference as she turned, and offered him a gentle, yet still timid smile.
"They made me that way," she soon frowned before turning away again.
How could he comfort someone in such turmoil? How could he fight everything that they had forced her to go through? The task seemed impossible, but still he felt compelled to try.
"You are beautiful on the inside, too," he told her, and he could instantly feel the tension release from her, and she slowly turned to throw him an endearing smile.
At this, he pulled the car in front of the room, before returning his attention to her again.
"It doesn't matter what the world thinks of you," he told her as he removed her long, golden locks from in front of her eyes, "because happiness is something that we create for ourselves."
She chuckled at this comment in such a beautiful, yet childish way.
"Even if your creator is not the usual one?" she inquired with a smile that allowed him solace.
For an instant, he wanted to reach over to her, and kiss her passionately, if only to convince her that she was far more than what they had been trying to create of her, but he froze when she placed her hand upon his cheek, and whispered softly to him, words that melted him.
"Did they create you to be so charming?"
As flattering as this was, it quickly brought him to realize that she had no idea that she was so unique. As far as he knew, she could think that she was commonplace, and certainly, she was far from it.
"We need to get you inside," he finally found the strength to say before stepping out of the car, and making his way around it to treat her like a gentleman would.
"Thank you," she told him as he opened the door, genuinely impressed by his manners, and for a moment, as she stepped from the car, she held his gaze with a sensual smile. "A gentleman is someone that I was never allowed to meet."
This both flattered him, and ripped at him, as it delighted him to please her, but the reason that it pleased her should not have been. He was really beginning to despise the people that he worked for, because of what they had done to such an innocent woman, though still he had to keep his mind thinking clearly.
"I'll go get what you need, Kitten," he said as he opened the door to the room, and the glow in her eyes, from the euphoria that came from him calling her that, simply melted him. "Don't answer the door for anyone but me, and keep the curtains closed."
She simply nodded, still smiling as he turned away to see if anyone was watching. He then closed the door behind him, and headed back to his car.
This was when it hit him like a ton of bricks. He was beginning to fall for a G.E.O., and he was seeing just how well that had worked out for Ryan and Mirage. He was in a coma in Venice, supposedly put there by her, and she was to be hunted and killed like an animal.
Sure, he knew that she would have never willingly harmed him, but this did nothing to change the story from a tragedy to a romance. Romeo and Juliet loved each other dearly, yet still, in the end they were both quite dead.
Sitting, he pulled the seatbelt across his torso to click it in, though about jumped out of his skin as his eyes made contact with something that was not supposed to be there.
"I want to go with you," Viper told him from the passenger seat, with a look of innocence that paralyzed him, and before he could even ask how she had done that, she continued.
"If you get me to a computer," she explained in a tone that made him realize that she really wanted to go, "I can disable the security cameras at the mega-mart, so that they won't even see us together."
He still sat there with his mouth wide open, so she reached over, and closed it for him as she smiled.
"Even I don't know what size clothes I wear," she said as her soft, green eyes completely captivated him for a moment.
"Good point," he responded as he put the car into reverse, and backed out. "You can't be in my lab coat if I can't revive you, and naked isn't a very dignified way to be found dead."
Truth was, he would have done pretty much whatever she asked of him. At the age of thirty, he was too young to be her father, but was rather a bit older than her lover should be, so he convinced himself that a brother would do no less for his sister.
This, he also found hard to grasp.
* * *
Walking into the mega-mart, she stared intently at the old man that was there to greet them, and he stared intently back at her, while oddly enough, this produced a moment of jealousy within Charlie until they passed that point, and she turned to look up at him.
"I had to distract him," she slightly scolded as she grabbed his hand to walk by his side as though they were a couple. "I have naked feet."
He almost corrected her, to tell her that they were called bare feet, but determined that he liked the sound of naked feet even better. Little did he know, she already understood that.
"Shoes first then," he said as he began to guide her to that department.
The walk there seemed as though in slow motion to him, as thoughts both raced and
exploded within his head. One topic was about how much trouble he was going to be in, while the next was about how little he cared about that. She was, by far, the most beautiful thing that he had ever seen.
He began to feel sorry for Ryan, for the most beautifully created woman now walked beside him, holding HIS hand. Certainly, this could end better than their tragedy had.
"I want tennis shoes and high heels," she said, interrupting his euphoria, though it was a welcomed interruption.
"Then we should find blue jeans, and a dress after that," he returned, though she was quick to change his mind,
"Nice looking tennis shoes," she told him as she gently squeezed his hand, determined to get what she wanted, "and a comfortable pair of black, dress slacks."
How could he disagree, when a woman's behind could look so nice behind a nice pair of slacks, but for a moment, he almost thought that he was thinking about her far too much.
"He made me try on outfits," she said as her face grew somber, remembering the memories that they had given her.
This was an awkward pause, as she seemed to fall into a moment where her past seemed to consume her thinking. He knew that these moments would come, though still he did not know how to react.
"I will not allow them to consume my mind anymore," she said with a grin of uncertainty, as she released his hand, and then began to walk the rows of shoes, before turning to look back at him.
"Would you find me some socks?"
She held his eyes for a moment, yet he felt compelled, eventually, to do as she requested. How could he refuse such a simple request, despite the fact that he did not wish to leave her, for more reasons than one?
He had been the one to program her computer capabilities, and although he did not have any part in the torment that he was beginning to realize they had placed upon her, he still felt guilty.
Slothfully and emotionally, he made his way to the socks. He did not know which ones he should grab, but figured that the smallest ones that he could find were likely the best option.
